digitalphiltrum

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
-Walt Whitman

one of the (many) great disappointments of my life is that i have never been the artist i set out to be. i have been blessed with the ability to be decent at just about anything that involves vision and creation, but no one medium has ever really held my attention long enough for me to develop any sort of real skill with it. i dabble. im a dabbler. its just what i do.

i have been a painter, a writer, a photographer, a poet…and yet, having never pursued any of those positions for longer than a momentary whim, i cannot actually say i have really been any of them. really, if anything, i can say i am an idealistic realist. i dream the dreams i know i will never pursue, and so they are just that….dreams. whether it is laziness or indecisiveness, fear or discouragement, or maybe even just an honest lack of talent – i always find myself drifting off to some other whim just moments after having settled down with the first one. at first i thought this was a serious problem, a mental disturbance or the result of yet another one of my parents countless errors, but now ive come to see it more as just another one of my little idosyncrasies. *

* idosyncrasy – a habit or trait that is particular to a person, cute if you love them, fucking annoying if you dont.

i think my problem is that i have such an overwhelming desire to experience everything. there is so much the world has to offer and so little time that finding a single focus is improbable if not impossible.

and so i have found myself often disappointed. and currently in the middle of a quarter life crisis.

or maybe its just a slump…

yeah…youre right. its a crisis..

people like me are supposed to end up dead broke, living with 7 roommates in a beat up little loft apartment in the middle of the city, wearing all black, drinking expresso all day and carrying a sketchbook/journal/camera/guitar everywhere they go while saying things like “only the petunia really understands my plight”. i am dead broke – i got that part down. but i hate roommates, my friends get tired of the black tshirts, the expresso gives me indigestion, the sketchbook is too big to carry around all day, the journal too valued, the camera too expensive and the guitar all of the above, and im just not deep enough to say things about petunias and plight without laughing. so instead i have become that person who sits out on park benches staring off into the distance as if trying to grasp some important idea that is just out of reach.

no…not the homeless person, the other one, the one without the bottle of booze. im too cheap for booze.

so where does that leave me? i dont know. will i eventually find a niche? or am i destined to be a dabbler? and honestly, isnt everyone a dabbler in some sense? we all have those little things we try to take up from time to time, only to find that it isnt quite what we thought it would be – music, the gym, long-term committed relationships….

at any rate, i was feeling like a writer today, so i thought i would blog about it.

im not going to try to say something eloquent or profound about the anniversary today marks. there is nothing i can say that has not been said already, and said much better than i could ever hope to say it.

what i will say is that i take time to pause and reflect this day every year on where i was, where i am, and where i am going.

people ask “where were you five years ago today?” and i have two answers to that:

the first being: i was a week into my sophomore year in college, on my way back from my 8am class with my new roommate, deirdre. we were debating whether or not we should get breakfast when one of the groundsmen, a crazy old guy who always wore these giant orange FM radio headphones, started yelling at us, “have you heard? have you heard? we are under attack! the united states is under attack!” we laughed and joked, trying to figure out what the heck he was talking about, and we went and got breakfast. we would return to our dorm room 15 minutes later and turn on the tv just in time to see the second plane hit the other tower. i didnt know at that moment that our lives would forever be changed by the images we were seeing before us, i was just plain old confused, and scared.

my second answer though, is: five years ago today, before 8:48AM, i was at a high point of my life. i was living in an ethereal world where the sun never set and the opportunities were endless. the future was so far off in the distance that its mere existence was virtually unknown to me. i had great friends, a great apartment, a cute boyfriend, an easy job and no responsibility outside of showing up for classes once in a while and doing a bit of reading and writing inbetween. i was extending my adolescence for another 3 years, completely oblivious to the existence of anything outside of my little college life bubble, and it was wonderful. absolutely wonderful.

but then some terrorists flew some planes into some buildings…and the bubble burst.

on a campus where the majority of students come from NY and NJ, it was virtually impossible to not know someone who lost someone close to them that day. there was fear and panic, confusion, sadness, anger. the chapel filled with people seeking comfort, stability…something, dorms filled with friends who didnt want to be alone. we tried to comfort those who couldnt find their parents, siblings, or friends who worked in the towers. we tried to ignore the nagging question, “is it over..or is there more to come?” we watched helplessly as the events of the day unfolded. some of us went home. i was one of those people.

i abandoned my friends who couldnt get calls through to ny, i abandoned my boyfriend who was scared because his dad might have been in the pentagon that day. i ran home. not because i felt that i needed comfort, but because i consider myself a weak person, and i couldnt stand to see so many people i depended on for strength so completely scared, without answers. i regret it. i wish i could have been the person then that i am today.

in the days, weeks, months and years that followed 9/11, its effects continued to spiral. the world changed; i changed. i trusted less and read more. paused often, and paid more attention. my respect for my friends grew, and my concept of friendship and responsibility to other people changed drastically. thankfully, i didnt lose anyone close to me that day, but i could have. suddenly there was a world outside of loyola — there was war, corruption, death, a dot com bust, a stretched economy and less and less opportunity with every day that passed. hate for people of other nationalities grew within america, hate for americans grew outside of america. the NSA began tapping our phone lines, the government started reading our mail, our email, and our search engine key words. credit card companies started putting a hold on any sudden large payments, and banks began looking for “suspicious” activity.

five years later, i am a completely different person living a completely different life in a completely different world. is it all because of 9/11? of course not. but i cannot deny that i live in a post 9/11 society, where the actions of that fateful morning still continue to affect me and my activities every day of my life – from the simple act of doing a google search to the 2 hours of extra time spent in an airport just to fly out of state – you cannot escape 9/11. you can only learn from it and try to grow.

more important than where we were 5 years ago today is where we actually are today and where we are going.

yea!! my blog is fixed! turns out it was my hosts fault – they had to do a file restore from the old servers to get the blog back up and running. but all is good now. and i am back. and there is much rejoicing.

that is all for now. more later…maybe.